It’s fair to say that standard business users are more empowered to solve digital business problems today than they were at the turn of the century. Digital collaboration is far more advanced. Using email is not seen as digitally transforming, rather outdated, or too formal to use in everyday digital collaboration. Today, business users are being encouraged by many organizations to grow into power users, but what is a power user?
Power user definition
There are many synonyms of power user, citizen developer or citizen development being one coined by Gartner. They all point to the same place. A ‘power user’ is generally defined as someone who uses IT hardware and software beyond the standard capabilities. So, someone creating a new group in Microsoft Teams to facilitate collaboration isn’t really a power user, but a business user who has successfully adopted standard technology. However, the line between the two can be blurred.
Business user vs. power user
If that same business user utilizes Power Automate to create a Flow, which automates the handling of his notifications in teams, do we call that person a power user? After all, it’s going beyond the standard functionality in Microsoft Teams, yet using Power Automate to do as intended. I think the Power Platform perfectly represents the power user, and Power Apps was recently named a Leader for Low Code Application Platforms by the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Less demand on IT departments?
As more and more organizations move to the cloud and adopt modern approaches to solve business solutions, the burden on IT development resources will be lessened. Although, consequently, these created solutions must be picked up further down the line. It will no longer be business user vs. IT developer, but business user and power user vs. admin.
Business user and power user vs. admin
If the lines between business user and power user are becoming blurred as collaboration technology continues to evolve rapidly, this means that pressure on administrators and platform owners to govern actions is greater as creating business solutions outside IT becomes the norm.
The administrator or platform owner isn’t only accountable or responsible for managing the day-to-day functionality that the collaboration platform offers business users, they must also account for the growing number of low-code and no-code solutions.
A perfect example can again be found with applications built out of Power Apps or even simple Flows created in Power Automate, which are often used to trigger communication across Microsoft 365. Namely, Teams and SharePoint.
A helping hand for platform owners and administrators
An estimated 70% of enterprises will use low-code or no-code tools by 2025. Many of those organizations will choose Microsoft Power Platform for their power users.
If you’re interested in governing them effectively, download our Power Platform governance best practices whitepaper for free today.
What is the difference between a power user and a citizen developer?
In practice very little, and the distinction matters less than what each of them leaves behind. A power user pushes standard tools beyond their default use. A citizen developer, Gartner's term, builds something other people then depend on. The moment either creates an app, a flow or an agent that a colleague uses, they have created an object that needs an owner, a data classification and an end of life, whatever you call the person who made it.
Do power users need a special licence to build in Microsoft 365?
Mostly no, which is what makes this a governance question rather than a procurement one. A standard Microsoft 365 licence already includes Power Apps and Power Automate for use with the standard connectors, plus a default Power Platform environment every licensed user can build in. Premium connectors and Dataverse need a separate licence. Nobody has to raise a ticket to start, so the estate grows without a request anyone can count.
How many power users should we expect to have?
More than the number who would describe themselves that way, and the useful figure is not a headcount at all. Ask instead how many apps, flows and agents exist in the default environment, and how many of them have been opened in the last ninety days. The first number is usually larger than IT expects and the active share is usually smaller. That ratio, not the number of people, tells you whether you have an enablement problem or a clean-up problem.
Should we stop people building their own apps and flows?
Almost never, and the attempt tends to move the activity somewhere you can see even less. The workable position is that anyone may build, and anything other people depend on gets an owner, a review date, and a classification of the data it touches. Set the bar where a personal tool becomes a shared one, because that is where the risk starts, not where someone opens the designer.
Do Purview and the Power Platform admin center already cover what power users build?
They cover real parts of it. The admin center inventories environments, apps and flows, Purview classifies and labels the data those objects touch, and DLP policies block connector combinations you have chosen to forbid. What none of them answers is whether a given app is still needed, who is accountable for it now that its maker changed team, and what should happen to it at offboarding. Rencore Governance adds that layer, inventorying every app, flow and agent across environments with a named owner and lifecycle rules. It extends the native tooling rather than replacing it.
What happens to a power user's app when they leave the company?
Usually it keeps running on their permissions until the account is disabled, then it fails silently, or a colleague quietly rebuilds it. Neither outcome raises an alert and neither reaches IT as an incident, so the first sign is a business process that stopped working for reasons nobody can name. Offboarding should read the app and flow inventory the same way it reads the mailbox, and reassign before the account goes.
Matthias is a former 10-year Microsoft MVP, co-founder, and CEO at Rencore. His mission is to help enterprises stay in control of their Microsoft collaboration technology. Matthias and his team achieve this by providing insights, advice, and actionable ways to manage platform growth. Matthias is speaking at many conferences and community events all over the world and is one of the organizers of the European Collaboration Summit.
